VMWare ESXi for web hosts

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mylesw

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We are getting really great results with VMWare in our data center. We currently have ESXi installed on 4 servers, and they are supporting about 20 virtual CentOS Linux servers. Performance is incredible and considering VMWare ESXi is free, its remarkable.

I'm curious if others are getting the same results we are seeing? So far, after about 18 months of having it set this way, I've got great experiences.

Myles
 
How are you able to administer your VMs? I've heard that ESXi doesn't include the standard admin software that is included in the paid versions or is this wrong?

We've been looking into using ESXi and have been wondering about administration.

I have personally tried ESXi on my own server at home but only for a short while. But it didn't seem to be quite suitable for the old hardware that I had. Is it better on newer hardware?

Sorry for hijacking your thread.
 
We have actually moved away from VMware ESXi because the hardware requirements are too stringent and did not permit central management utility for migration and clustering (at least not with the free version).
 
Also, It is my understanding that ESXi (the free version) does not support a licenese to host comercially.

All of our servers are VMware. Running vSphere. Which is VMware's "Cloud OS".

WebSliceNZChris:
Our control panel makes calls to the infrastructure using the VIX API.
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api/

DeadAIX.. AFAIK... The only hardware limitation even with the free version is that is requires a SCSI storage subsystem to install. Even then you can make a change to allow for IDE/SATA. But you know as well as I do that one should not be trying to offer a enterpise solution without SCSI/SAS anyways. :) I have seen the free version boot up and run on some really old hardware. It's only complaint is the storage sub. And the free version does allow for central management. Migrating (Vmotion) does require VI and at least ESX server.

Brandon
 
I have not seen the best experience with VMware ESXi in a hosting environment. You really have to be careful about overselling, and the performance was lacking.
 
Interesting. We found better performance with VMware than the other two virtualization options that we tested. A lot of it has to do with your backend storage.

Overselling is not a option for us. When a instance is created and the user has selected a 4GB VPS we utilize the entire 4GB for the customer. A option is supported where you can allow a instance to use just the bare minimum needed up to a maximum but I feel that is misleading and you take a performance hit.
 
That's correct, I remember reading up about it. VMware was going to be an option, but the free version isn't allowed to be used and sold commercially (ie. selling VPS)

The control panel is also designed for company users.
 
ESXi is a great system when paid, however on the free version software sure as XenSource is more feature rich.

Both a very similar and have a great performance though.
 
Have you tried Citrix? Citrix is quite interesting and in some areas seems to have more features than Vmware in some aspects.
 
I have seen ESXi running CentOS that is running OpenVZ - results are interesting, since there are 2 VMs , there have been certain instabilities with these two working together.

However I personally like ESXi since it really seems to have nice GUI and a well configured VEs can pretty much run stable on it without any issue.
When I was running ESXi there were 10 containers on the node, all allocated with 2 GB ram and 2 with 4 GB RAM.
 
We tried the VMware route but as a Linux shop switched over to Citrix. Since our team has more Linux than Windows knowledge this allowed us to better optimize our environments and leverage our existing expertise.

Never had an issue with ESXi but VMWare Server was always problematic under high disk IO.
 
We have had real performance problems with Windows Server 2003 and XenServer. Recently switched over to ESXi and couldn't be happier :)
 
We are primarily a Linux House (but support windows for dedicated/vps clients if need be,) So I haven't had much experience with Esxi as far as our business goes

However, I have had some luck with it in a private deployment (School District to lessen the server count) and it's decent.

Personally I would stick with XenServer, or better yet just build an OpenVZ Node for windows delpoyments.
 
VMWare ESXi has a pretty good support system but not really on the free level. But if you don't really need a support then its a good free tool as far as free tools go.
 
I've not heard of many hosting companies using vsxi. Seems they all prefer a xen based or openvz based solution. As previously said, the esxi support hardware list is surprisingly very limited. Maybe soon, the Redhat funded bare metal hypervisor will be ready for prime time and lend itself to vps hosting.
 
I have been running ESXi on 6 Dell 1950 servers for over a year now. Running vSphere, they are all clustered with failover, and use a Dell MD-300 fiber-san. I am impressed at the performance and detailed integration that VMware has provided. The only problem I ever had was setting up the vCenter Server, which you HAVE to run on a Windows VM, but it adds extended capabilities so it is worth it.

I did spend a little bit of money on the licenses, but its a lifetime license, and it is worth it for all the features that vCenter and ESXi servers provide.
 
We have used Vmware Vsphere with ESXI for our Virtualization and i must say the Vmware VSphere is very very good

BUT the only thing i hate about it is that you can set a amount of Disk Space you want the system to have but in reality its really something else.


Imagine how many Providers would Scam there clients using this?
 
if you are going for comercial hosting, i would sugest Xen, good performance and FREE. we have tryed the Citrix version of Xen and it is good in its own ways, dont tink about using it for comercial hosting, i think it is best for enterprise stuff.
 
We have been seeing great results running ESXI on our westmere x5670's. We don't use it for our hosting platform though. We only use it for some of our internal services.
 
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